By Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim

Trumped!

In
a stunning conclusion to the 2016 US General Election, Democratic presidential
candidate Hillary Clinton — who had been enthusiastically predicted by
pollsters, including Nate Silver’s
celebrated FiveThirtyEight forecast, to be the winner
— pulled defeat from the jaws of victory and lost to her Republican rival
Donald Trump. Trump’s win was
especially shocking given that almost the entire pundit class and mass media in
the US, and more importantly, the plutocrats of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, with
their generous donations to the Clinton campaign, had, by the end of the
campaign season, closed ranks around Clinton and publicly displayed their united
opposition to Trump. Trump hadn’t helped himself with his history of sexually
improper behavior having come into sharp public focus in the final weeks of the
campaign. This, together with negative media reports recounting his xenophobic statements
against undocumented immigrants and Muslims, convinced the Clinton campaign and
its supporters that their candidate would easily win over women and racial
minorities and seal her electoral win. The shock of Trump’s victory hence
exceeds the shock of the
earlier Brexit referendum in the UK, where the referendum
result similarly took the pollsters
by surprise.

One
reason for this lies with the concept of intersectionality, which states that
the different registers of our identity — race, gender identity, and so on — intersect
in different ways, giving rise to a divergence of interests. For example, the
interests of an African-American transwoman may be different from those of a
white transwoman because of their different racial positionalities. While
Clinton herself was familiar with the
concept of intersectionality, her campaign
failed to recognize how intersectionality would complicate the voting behavior
of different groups in the electorate.

The
Latino surge during the early voting period of the election, for example, had
been celebrated by pundits as having delivered an unequivocal wall
of votes against Trump, which “could be enough to overcome Mr.
Trump’s strength among white-working class voters” and win the election for
Clinton. However, class interests within the Latino community overcame their
racial solidarity, creating significant votes for Trump. Many Latinos, for
example, defied the pundits’ expectations that they would oppose Trump because
of his rhetoric against undocumented immigration, including his promise of
building a wall on the
US-Mexico border. As it turned out, these Latinos felt
that Trump’s policies would protect their hard-won economic and social gains
from the challenges posed by undocumented immigrants. 51 percent of
Latinos felt that “too little” has been done to “enforce
immigration laws,” while 49 percent “support a policy causing illegal
immigrants to return home by enforcing the law.”

In the 2016 US General
Election, the immiserated and humiliated working class that was destroyed by
globalization has spoken up for itself at the ballot box.

Religion
and value systems are other registers of identity that give rise to intersectionality,
and many conservative
persons of color— including
Asian- and African-Americans — became Trump supporters due to their opposition to the
progressive gains made by LGBT groups under the Obama
administration, even though pundits had expected them to be pro-Clinton due to
their racial minority status. In longer-term perspective, this reflects the
strategic error of the pursuit of LGBT rights through legislation — including
marriage equality and the right of transgender individuals to use bathrooms
that reflect their gender identity — in that these legal rights were won
without corresponding challenges to the lingering homophobia and transphobia in
society, creating significant groups of voters who felt
morally opposed to Clinton’s candidacy.

Clinton
herself did her candidacy no favors when she publicly described “half of Trump
supporters” as a “basket of
deplorables” which includes those who are “racist,
sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it.” While she later
expressed regret for making that statement, the damage was already done. By
giving this disparate group of individuals a catchy name to rally themselves
around, Clinton unwittingly energized Trump’s growing pool of supporters,
especially on social media where many of his supporters appended “Deplorable”
to their Facebook and Twitter nicknames, proudly identifying their affiliation
and politics to their social media followers.

“Middle-aged,
non-college-educated white Americans’ life expectancy is going down and is now
lower than Hispanics, even though they make less money. And the gap between
African Americans and whites is closing, but unfortunately not because the
death rate among African Americans is dropping but because the death rate among
white Americans is rising. Why? Because they don’t have anything to look
forward to when they get up in the morning. Because their lives are sort of
stuck in neutral.”

Little
wonder that exit polls
conducted during the election found that “four
in 10 voters said they were hungry for change … 7 in 10 voters said they were
unhappy with the way the government is working, including a quarter who said
they were outright angry,” and “six in 10 voters said the country is on the
wrong track.”

What’s
next? Fears that the US political system will be gripped in gridlock after the
election are likely to be unfounded, as the Republican Party has captured not
just the presidency, but also retained control of the House of
Representatives and the Senate. This
trifecta will likely allow the Trump administration to fill the vacancy
on the Supreme Court left by the death of Antonin Scalia with
its preferred candidate, along with the vacancies that will come with the
expected retirements of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.

“Many will
celebrate this result, while others will understandably be surprised and
disappointed. But like the Brexit referendum in June, Mr Trump’s victory is
part of a broader pattern in developed countries — reflecting a deep
frustration with the way things are, and a strong wish to reassert a sense of
identity, and somehow to change the status quo.”

It
is indeed reflective of this “broader pattern” that among the world leaders who
congratulated Trump were Marine Le Pen, the
leader of France’s far-right National Front, Geert Wilders, the leader of the
Netherland’s far-right Freedom Party, and Nigel Farage, the far-right leader of
the UK Independence Party who led the successful Brexit campaign. The excitement of the
European far-right is understandable as Trump’s success will
energize their movements in the elections that are scheduled over the
next 12 months, with these far-right parties seeking “to
follow Britain’s lead and quit the European Union.” These challenges will begin
next month, on December 4 with an election in Austria and a referendum in
Italy, followed by elections next year in the Netherlands, France, and Germany.

About The Author

Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim is a research fellow with International Public Policy Pte. Ltd. (IPP), and is the author of Cambodia and the Politics of Aesthetics (Routledge 2013). He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and has taught at Pannasastra University of Cambodia and the American University of Nigeria. Prior to joining IPP, he was a research fellow with the Longus Institute for Development and Strategy.